2 killed in shooting near New York’s Empire State Building
NEW YORK: Two people were killed and at least eight wounded in a shooting outside the New York’s Empire State Building on Friday. Police has denied terrorism link with the incident.
One of the dead was the shooter, the police source said.
“I heard the gunshots. It was like pop, pop, pop. It was definitely in a bunch,” said Dahlia Anister, 33, who works at an office near the 102-story Empire State Building.
The shooting started shortly after 9 a.m. (1300 GMT) on the busy sidewalk on Fifth Avenue outside the Midtown Manhattan building.
It came at the height of the tourist season outside one of New York City’s most popular he Empire State Building is two blocks from Pennsylvania Station and eight blocks from Grand Central Terminal, two of New York City’s main transportation hubs.
Mail courier James Bolden, 31, said he saw a “guy laying on the (sidewalk), bleeding from the neck and barely breathing.”
“Everybody was crowded around him taking pictures and video, and security guys were yelling everybody to get back, and give him space. He was barely breathing,” Bolden said.
One witness said she saw a woman who was shot in the foot and another woman being taken away in an ambulance.
The United States has had two other mass shooting cases this summer. On July 20, a gunman opened fire at a midnight screening of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and wounding 58.
On August 5, a gunman killed six people and critically wounded three at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee before police shot him dead in an attack authorities treated as an act of domestic terrorism.
This was the second high-profile shooting incident in two weeks in New York’s tourist-heavy midtown Manhattan. On August 12 New York City police shot and killed a knife-wielding suspect as he sought to evade them through Saturday afternoon traffic and pedestrians in Times Square.. Police cordoned off the area around the building, one of the most recognizable in the world.
